How well have you planned for a change in circumstances that are inevitable in our personal and professional lives?

Do you have contingency plans in place in case, you lose your top salesperson or a competitor lures away your best customer? How would you handle being told you are being transferred to another city or your spouse unexpectedly loses their job?  

According to an article from Indeed, a contingency plan helps you prepare for unanticipated occurrences that might cost you time, money, or even your entire business.

Here are 7 Steps to help create your business contingency plan:

1. Identify the essential components of your business - Determine which employees, resources,  and processes are necessary to keep the business running.

2. Determine your risk - Identify potential risks such as natural disasters, economic downturns, labor strikes, material shortages, distribution problems, etc.

3. Organize your group of risks into categories - Risks come in a multitude of forms but they can usually be broken down into the following categories: Financial Risks, Time Risks, Technical Risks, Environmental Risks, and Resource Risks.

4. Prioritize your risk based on impact and likelihood - Put more work into the events that pose the greatest threat to your operations.

5. Determine how to resume normal operations for each risk event - Identify what would need to be done to get the company up and running and who is responsible for each activity.

6. Share your contingency plans with essential personnel - Distribute your contingency plans across the organization so that everyone knows their role and the roles of everyone else on the Contingency Team.

7. Update your contingency plans on a regular basis - Contingency Plans should be reviewed quarterly to make sure the right people are in place and understand their roles as part of the plan.   

Please check out the short video below to learn more about the importance of developing a contingency plan for your business (or personal life.) 

Also, please leave me a comment about any contingency plans you have developed for your business or personal life.   

Would you know a person of good character if you met one?

Character are behaviors that are so ingrained that they can't be controlled.

As a result, to determine if some has good character look to the pattern of their behaviors. Are they someone who is always talking about another person behind their back? Are they someone who says one thing but it's not backed up by their behavior? Are the someone with poor people skills that makes everything about them?

I once had a Vice President of a company who interviewed me for a marketing position. We spent 90 minutes in an interview together. He never asked me one question about marketing. He asked me about my parents, my relationship with my siblings, my experiences in college, etc.

After I was hired I asked him about his unique interviewing style. He explained that he had people around him who would tell him if I was a good fit for the team in terms of my marketing experience, but what he was really interested in was making sure he hired people of good character.  He went on to say that he believed that character was formed in the first twenty years of our lives. As such, all his questions were geared toward my experiences in life up to the time I graduated from college.

Robert Greene believes that the advancement in technology and its impact in so many areas of our lives, is making us more primitive and less able to understand people.

Check out the video below to learn about Robert Greene's assessment of how we should be determining if a person has good character.